The Romanian Constitutional Court on Friday annulled the first round of the presidential election after declassified intelligence documents suggested Russian influence operations gave nationalist candidate Calin Georgescu his surprising victory.
The Romanian president is an influential political leader but has limited power compared to the country’s prime minister. Romanians nonetheless vote for a president to work in tandem with the prime minister and other political leaders.
Georgescu, 62, is a former soil scientist who worked for the Romanian environmental ministry and later represented Romania for the United Nations Environment Program. He entered politics as a member of the nationalist Alliance for the United of Romanians (AUR) party, but quit during party squabbles and became an independent candidate.
Georgescu is an admirer of President-elect Donald Trump and has expressed agreement with him on numerous issues, including climate change and pushing back against LGBTQ propaganda. He has also expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, deep skepticism of Western support for Ukraine, and very harsh criticism of left-wing billionaire George Soros.
This week, Georgescu said he intended to ban Ukrainian grain exports through Russia – a major pipeline for Ukrainian grain to avoid Russian blockades – and would discontinue further military aid to Kyiv.
“It is unimaginable that there be a war next to us in the middle of Europe, so a priority will definitely be that this war in Ukraine must immediately be stopped,” he said.
One area where Georgescu strongly disagrees with Trump is NATO spending. Trump has insisted NATO members should meet their obligation to spend two percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense, while Georgescu said he is “not even interested” in increasing military outlays.
“The concern of the Romanian people is to be happy. They cannot be happy spending money on other things. If NATO is defensive, then it should remain defensive. I believe one thing – Romania has an obligation to no one,” he said.
Georgescu is also an economic nationalist, running on a platform of giving Romanian companies majority control over joint investments with foreign entities, opposing the privatization of state assets, and challenging European Union funding programs that have failed to lift Romania out of poverty.
“Have European funds helped us? Are we reliant on European funds? This country can’t produce? Don’t we have other investors? There is money everywhere in this world, let me tell you,” he said on Tuesday.
Georgescu ran with strong Christian themes in his campaign, promoting traditional values and appealing to rural Romanians who felt alienated and abandoned by urban political culture. Agence France-Presse (AFP) found voters disgusted with Romania’s political establishment flocked to Georgescu, many of them choosing him over center-right alternatives because of the Christian faith message in his campaign and his resistance to the LGBTQ agenda.
Much of that disgust is fueled by Romania’s status as one of the most corrupt nations in Europe; Transparency International regularly ranks it among the nations with the lowest integrity scores on the continent.
Another trend among Georgescu voters is that they tended to distrust establishment media and they thought media criticism of the upstart candidate had gone too far overboard. Some told AFP they decided to give Georgescu a chance after watching his TikTok videos and concluding he was not the monster depicted in Romanian and international media.
Georgescu was considered an obscure fringe candidate going into the election. He spent very little on his campaign – he claims he spent nothing, but others dispute that boast – and built most of his following with social media platforms, especially TikTok.
“The most important existing function for promoting free speech and freedom of expression is social media,” he said when asked if he had any qualms about using the Chinese-owned TikTok as the primary vehicle for his campaign.
Romanian media largely ignored him as a sideshow, but he developed a huge footprint online, winning an astounding 31 percent of the youth vote. International media uniformly described him as “far-right,” an “ultranationalist,” or even a “fascist,” but like other upstart right-wing candidates across the free world, he found ways to reach disaffected voters by going around the media.
Romanian political observers were therefore stunned when he took first place in last week’s presidential election. When the results were released on Monday, Georgescu was out front with 22.9 percent of the vote. The second-place finisher, former journalist and mayor Elena Lasconi of the Save Romania Union (USR) party, took 19.17 percent, followed closely by sitting Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu of the center-left, pro-European Union Social Democrats (PSD).
Ciolacu nabbed about 3,000 fewer votes than Lasconi, a narrow loss that excluded PSD from the mandatory second-round runoff election for the first time in three decades. There were actually 14 candidates in the race, most of them more “centrist” than Georgescu, so Monday brought confident predictions that voters for the other parties would rally against the dark-hose nationalist independent and boost Lasconi into office. The only other strongly right-leaning major candidate was populist George Simion, who expected to finish second and was stunned to find himself in fourth place behind Ciolacu.
Polling soon made it clear that Georgescu was the front-runner in the second-round election to be held on Sunday, with support from Simion and the AUR party, further stunning the Romanian political and media establishment. On Friday, the Constitutional Court pulled the plug, raising an outcry from Georgescu voters who accused the long-in-power PSD of using the courts to nullify an election it could not win fairly.
The Constitutional Court nullified the election after declassified Romanian intelligence documents were released early this week, accusing Georgescu of winning with the aid of some 25,000 phony TikTok accounts controlled by a Russian disinformation campaign.
The documents further suggested the Romanian election system was compromised by a wave of over 85,000 cyberattacks. The speed, size, and scale of the assault was presented as evidence of coordination by a state actor, presumed to be Russia.
On Thursday, Romania’s top prosecutor opened an investigation of “indications regarding electoral crimes that would have influenced the voting process, through methods such as corrupting voters, including in the online environment.”
Several Romanian civil society groups quickly filed petitions demanding the annulment of the election, and on Friday the top court obliged those requests. The Court nullified “the entire electoral process concerning the election of the president of Romania” and said it would set a new date for the election to begin from scratch.
Georgescu supporters cried foul. Simion declared the court was conducting a “coup d’etat” to keep PSD in power, and urged his supporters to make their disapproval known without staging messy protests that could be used as an excuse to crack down on them.
“We are not taking to the streets, we will not be provoked. This system must fall democratically!” Simion said.
“Nine politically appointed judges, scared that a candidate outside the system had all chances to become Romania’s president, decided to annul Romanians’ will,” he said.
Lasconi also condemned the court ruling, saying it was “illegal, amoral, and crushes the very essence of democracy: voting.”
“We should have moved forward with the vote. We should have respected the will of the Romanian people. Whether we like it or not, from a legal and legitimate standpoint, nine million Romanian citizens, both in the country and the diaspora, expressed their preference for a particular candidate through their votes. We cannot ignore their will!” she declared.
“I know I would have won. And I will win because the Romanian people know I will fight for them, that I will unite them for a better Romania. I will defend our democracy. I will not give up,” she said.
Prime Minister Ciolacu praised the court decision, calling it “the only correct solution” following the release of the intelligence report.
“The Romanian people’s vote was flagrantly distorted as a result of Russian interference,” he said.
“The presidential elections must be held again. At the same time, investigations by the authorities must uncover who is responsible for the massive attempt to influence the outcome of the presidential election,” he said.
Georgescu himself dismissed the investigations into his campaign as the work of George Soros’ minions in an interview with Sky News on Thursday.
“I can tell you one sentence. The last Soros Fortress has fallen. This man has made them desperate,” he said.
Interestingly, no major media outlet seems to have asked Georgescu what he thinks about the court action as of late Friday morning, or has informed their readers of anything he might have said online.
Georgescu’s supporters seem determined to stand behind him, which raises the distinct possibility that he will win the rerun election – perhaps by even broader margins, if enough Romanians agree with Simion that the Constitutional Court staged a coup. As of Friday morning, there does not appear to be any discussion of banning Georgescu from running again.
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